P2P in 2001

nihilist_1137 writes: "Zdnet is reporting that P2P is becoming more used in business. "It's now over two years since a few underground song-swapping services put peer-to-peer technology firmly at the forefront of the IT agenda... A look back at some of the more significant P2P stories of 2001 shows that -- although not a new concept -- P2P is starting to assume a very important role in the corporate space, as tech giants scramble to succeed in this new market."" Hard to believe that the Napster battles have been going on for two years now.

Comments

Re:About time...

[Angry White Guy]

p2p is good technology, but from a management standpoint, p2p is missing one major portion that the client-server model isn't: Control

Even if authentication is there, if logging is there, management ( at least the ones I have run into) like the idea of a central, impenetrable bastion of information, with big pretty accounting graphs. It is a large firewall to bringing about change in anything other than a pure technology-oriented business.

AWG

4 out of 5 doctors think that the 5th one smells.

A really cool use of P2P

[Anaplexian]

The folks at OpenCola have thought up a really cool use of P2P - to Save a website's Bandwidth Problems. The technology allows websites to send parts of a large file to individual users, and then each user uses P2P to get the rest of the file. I think it's a really cool way to stop net congestion. No wonder they're one of Fortune's 25 cool companies of 2001.

Re:The biggest flaw

[Jordy]

Actually... Napster's backend can sort by network distance (we have the ability to determine the network distance between two arbitrary IPs in log(N) time), but we only enabled it for Internet2.

So for example, we know Sprint peers with UUnet and so Sprint users would see Sprint users first, UUnet users next. Doing it at the AS level is far easier than actually attempting to map the actual hop distance between every arbitrary point on the Internet.